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thank you for your kind help! Sorry that I did not reply ASAP, I have late shift this week and did not manage to try all your tips. I am looking forward to this weekend to have some time for that though. :)

Btw.: Sorry that I got confused about Hans & Heinz - I don not know how this happened to me.

Thanks! I downloaded the project file and will have a closer look at it tomorrow, if the PTgui trial version will let me open it.

Originally Posted by hansnyberg

I never include the rotator in the pano also because that will give you problems if you want to stitch the nadir in PTGui using viewpoint. Even with just a small part of the rotator at the bottom it may give you a shadow in the blending which needs extra work.

Can you explain why this is causing problems? I understand that it is not real relevant image data and that (see your next tip) I could make my life easier leaving the rotator out of the images. But I thought that the PTgui mask feature would let me mark this part as non-relevant when adding a nadir image? I will be using the Nodal Ninja Nadir-Adapter - at least I hope that it will work with my tripod with center column ... .

Originally Posted by hansnyberg

Actually I would say that the best way of shooting with your lens is 8 at -30 8 at +30 and 1 zenith at +90.
That may of course sometimes give you problems with no features in the zenith but in most cases it is easy fixed if you learn to take the zenith the same way always.

Thank you for the tip! I will give that a try on the weekend. This would really ease taking a full sphere! I will report back here. :)

Originally Posted by hindenhaag

which version of autopano pro are you using. This is important to know, if it is possible to add a single CP to get better results in difficult situations. Yesterday I tried your second set in autopano giga and after deleting a lot of bad CP, link by link and pics by pics, I ended with a fair result, some stitching errors left. I do not work too much with autopano because I do not like the way CPs are placed and they way you have to del bad ones.

[...]

So there is a possibility to get a good result with autopano pro as well, but I prefer PTGui, specially the latest beta version with a lot of new functions.

I am using Autopano Pro 2.0.9 64-bit under Windows 7 64-bit. I have downloaded the alpha/beta version of Autopano Giga 2.5, but I find it not beeing really useable right now. I am also disappointed that Kolor choose not to offer manual CPs in the Pro edition but only in the Giga edition. I would be fine if they chose to have huge image size, HDR, new projections in the Giga ediation only.

At the moment it looks like I have to to swallow the bitter pill (in German "bite the sour apple") and spend some money on PTgui Pro.

PTgui assembles all of my image sets perfectly or nearly perfectly without any manual action and perfectly with some manual editing of CPs. If Autopano Pro requires me to do a huge amount of manual optimization, then I would rather spend the 150 EUR on PTgui Pro.

Originally Posted by Vincèn

In fact you need to download AutoPano Giga 2.5 Alpha 1, it includes possibility to add individual CP same was as you are used to do in PTGui ;)

See above, I really like this feature, but if this is the only solution to my problem, then I think PTgui is the way for me to go.

I am also really disappointed that Kolor did not respond to my thread in their forum at all. Over a week has passed now. I even send them a mail and asked if this was a limitation of Autopnao regarding the use of ultra wide angle lenses. But no reaction.

Thank you all, I can not tell how lucky I feel getting all this help here! Even if it drives me in the direction I did not want to (buy PTgui).

"Can you explain why this is causing problems? I understand that it is not real relevant image data and that (see your next tip) I could make my life easier leaving the rotator out of the images. But I thought that the PTgui mask feature would let me mark this part as non-relevant when adding a nadir image? I will be using the Nodal Ninja Nadir-Adapter - at least I hope that it will work with my tripod with center column ... ."

Well you have 8 images which you need to ad mask on. Just a tripod leg included in the image may destroy your nadir stitch. The stitcher does not know that it is not an important element. Of course it can be done with copy/paste now using the new mask function and it can probably also be included in a template. Does not work always yet though.
That will also exclude the rotator from being a target for auto-controlpoints which corrupts the stitching completely like it did in your example. But why include it when it does not have any function.

The nadir takes just 30 sec to take (also with long exposure bracketing ) by using the leaning tripod method which many of us uses.
And you do not need to change anything on your panohead, just tilt down slightly.

I had the same frustration with autopano like you concerning CP and the amount of work to get the pano right.

One thing I'd like to tell you about PTGui. HDR is a part of the program, which I personally only use for exposure fusion, with very confident results for me. I do not use the true HDR stitching, because I do not like the results. I look to this point of the program for not being so perfect. But actually this is not the biggest goal of PTGui. So if you like to do full HDRI, you better use a different program for this part of the work, Photomatix Pro for example or , cause you use windows, the new program of http://www.oloneo.com . Either you use these programs in the beginning, and place your HDRI pics in PTGUI, or you use PTGUI exposure fusion and place the different blended panos to photomatix. May be you try both workflows and then you decide what you like better.

But anyway, keep your autopano version to be able to upgrade later if you need this software for things you might do in the future, gigapixel..

Concerning the Zenith shot: in difficult situations, totally blue sky, very little or no connection to the rest of your pics, it helps to take two zenith shots for example at +60°pitch( depending of FOV of your lens} 180° visa versa, to get connection to the horizon by catching corners of houses, lamps posts etc.

I just want to give a short update on my progress, as I promissed to give feedback on the tips I received.

In the meantime I bought a copy of PTgui Pro and experimented a bit with the shooting technique suggested by Hans.

The 8 pictures at -30° + 8 pictures at +30° + 1 zenith + 2 nadir (180°) works pretty good. Thank you very much Hans!
I will have to practice takings panoramas with my gear now and eventually continue to fine tune the NPP. But for now I am really glad to have found a solution (PTgui with your tips).

The only downside sofar is that the performance of Autopano on my computer is way better than the one of PTgui (probably due to GPU processing). I also have the impression that PTgui is causing a lot of paging due to excessive use of memory. I will probably need to get more RAM (I currently only have 4GB).

Thank you all for your very kind help! I hope to give something back in the future!

You say the performance is better with Autopano. Usually it is the opposite. PTGui is at least double as fast (at least on Mac) however you may need to adjust your settings.
What is your computer especially how many cores do you have. There is cvurrently a problem using the auto settings for this.
In preferences (I believe it is called settings on windows) look at the advanced area. If you have a large number of cores you have them all set in Number of simultaneous threads to use.
Change the autosettings to just 2 if it says 4 or more. This may cut stitching time to half on Intel i7 processor computers which have 8 threads set as default.

If you have a 32bit computer Ptgui can only use 2 GB ram.- Your autosetting is then set to arround 50%